A’s Been Shopping In Yanks Backyard
Local boy Vin Mazzaro is scheduled to face the Yankees this evening for the Oakland A’s.
More on Mazzaro from the recent print edition of Baseball America –
No one really expected Vin Mazzaro to win a job in the Athletics’ rotation during spring training, but he gave it quite a shot before two rough outings led to assignment at Sacramento. Mazzaro responded by showing Triple-A hitters that he belonged elsewhere. He reeled off a 2-2, 2.38 record in 57 innings and was promoted to the majors.
He impressed even further in his first five starts with the A’s, going 2-2, 2.56. Mazzaro took off last year when he put together a 12-3, 1.90 record at Double-A Midland before being promoted to Sacramento. Farm director Keith Lieppman said that Mazzaro dedicated himself to the weight room after struggling when he was drafted in the third round in 2005 out of high school in Rutherford, N.J.
“He improved his work ethic, and he built his body. He just got better from there,” Lieppman said. Mazzaro also worked on his mental game and learned the subtle issues of pitching. The combination has led some in the A’s organization to believe they may have a legitimate ace in the making.
Between Mazzaro and Andrew Bailey, it appears that the A’s have found two nice pitching prospects playing in the shadow of Yankee Stadium.
Maybe that’s the new “Moneyball” trick…finding pitchers from the Northeast instead of the usual hot spots like Cali, FLA and Texas?
The essential tenet of Moneyball is not always clearly understood.
It is to look for what are called market inefficiencies, i.e., assets that are undervalued, and acquire them for less than their real value, or assets (or minuses) that are overvalued (or have negative real value) and sell them for more than their real value to those who are incorrectly valuing them.
Hence, the decision made 10-15 years ago to focus on players who drew loads of walks and had high OBP (then undervalued, not so much now), and to try to develop a succession of cheap “closers” (way overvalued by certain teams in certain circumstances) to be traded away. Beane did this with Street, and he’s in the process of doing it again with Andrew Bailey.
At the time the book was written, college players were undervalued in the draft, and the A’s had a theory that statistical translations of college records could unearth players of value that scouts would not recommend, allowing them to pick up players of value in various rounds of the draft that other teams would miss. The draft year the book focused on was a disaster for the A’s, and that, combined with the fact that the A’s couldn’t get past the 1st round of the playoffs, led outside observers to treat the who market inefficiency idea with scorn and derision.
However, “Moneyball” has the last laugh, because just about every team has an analysis department now, trying to implement these ideas, and developing more of them. Most GMs use some of these ideas, some, better than others.
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Is it possible the A’s are drafting more heavily in the Northeast, where the players don’t have as much developmental time because the weather inhibits the schedules that can be played in the South and Far West? Yeah, it’s possible. But two pitchers is not really much of a trend.
Perhaps overvalued is not exactly the right word in the case of closers.
It would be more accurate to say that a potentially solid closer has much more marginal value to a contender than to a team that’s not going to be in the race. And therefore more accurate to say that trading a good closer could make the difference in a playoff year for a contender, and therefore be worth a package of talent that would not be equitable if the closer were traded to another poor team, or in some imaginary “real fair market”.